


Bound

by Fuzziestpuppy



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 4
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, No Smut, One Shot, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 00:51:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16253273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fuzziestpuppy/pseuds/Fuzziestpuppy
Summary: Wait.  I’ll be back.  Just hold on.  I love you.Pagan shores up that belief with everything in him.





	Bound

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you again, [brokibrodinson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokibrodinson/pseuds/brokibrodinson) for being such an awesome beta!

\-------------------------------------------

The amount of work and planning that it took to smuggle Pagan Min into the United States was amusing on paper, but awful in practice.

America in 2003, two years post-9/11, is not what it once was, and to fly commercially on a forged passport is entirely too risky. The prospect of the FBI and CIA waiting for him to land is an unpleasant one, so they’d had to do it the hard way. 

Paul and Gary did the bulk of the logistical planning; a good map of the Pacific spread across the conference room table, with strings stretched to measure various distances. They’d decided early on that crossing Europe and the Atlantic was also entirely too risky and that the big helicopter could just make the distances required across the other hemisphere. It was a nightmare of a journey; Kyrat to Hong Kong to Palau to Kiribati, greasing the palms of local government officials the whole way to land and refuel, and then the last, long stretch over the Pacific, coasting into a private airport in Los Angeles on fumes. A miserable journey, since the Blackhawk is a machine of war, not meant for transporting personnel. They’d had a cooler, a bag of snacks, some military rations, and a bucket chained to the far wall. Five days to cross a distance that a commercial jet could have done in two.

But that doesn’t matter, none of that matters. 

He feels like perhaps he’s breaking their unspoken agreement by even being on American soil. But is he bound to a contract that he wasn’t even a party to? That damned letter. That precious, precious letter.

Ishwari wanted to leave Kyrat because of Mohan, but she also didn’t want…didn’t want the place to touch Ajay’s innocence, his inherent sweetness. Thus, he couldn’t touch Ajay either, a man with rough and bloodstained hands, tainted by so much blood and betrayal and war. 

In a way, he _is_ Kyrat, moreso than she; he represents everything Kyrat is, everything that Ishwari hated about the place is part of him too. And he can never live anywhere else. He knew that, from his very first sight of this place; a fundamental truth. He isn’t a man that was made to mow the lawn on weekends and fix the shutters and play catch. But he was always gentle, with her and Ajay and the baby, as gentle and loving as he knew how to be. Perhaps that just wasn’t enough. His love not enough. 

Perhaps he isn’t really even a man at all anymore, not completely, anyway, after all these years apart. At the very least, not one that she’d recognize.

Right now he feels like a tiger that he had hunted once, when he was younger; he’d slipped on the hillside and fouled his shot and caught the animal in the flank. He and the hunters had tracked it for most of a day before they could corner it in a ravine, and it had backed up as far as it could go, on three legs, and he fancied he could see the rage and pain and panicked _fear_ warring in its eyes. Suffering he’d inflicted in his clumsiness, the respect of a clean death denied it. 

He’d never hunted another. 

\-------------------------------------------

For three days, he circles her apartment building, walking the same four-block beat. He can’t force himself to go to her, to break their agreement that she would be the one to come back to him; it pushes at him like a force field, a ripping feeling down deep in his chest. He can’t force himself away from her either, so he circles, and circles, in pain and longing and other things he can’t name, that frighten and confuse him. 

He sits for hours on a park bench across the street from her apartment building more or less in plain sight, hope in his heart that she will spot him, see the physical evidence of his devotion; his presence, and let him in. 

Pathetic. 

Or perhaps she could talk to him here, them sitting together on this bench. It’s a decent sort of place to sit, with a tree for shade. A big tree of some type he doesn’t recognize. He’d stopped at the corner store and bought a bottle of soda and a bag of pistachio nuts; these he cracks and eats, more to have something to do with his hands than out of any real hunger. He wishes the soda were bourbon instead.

A dark part of him hopes that she feels pain like this, that she looks for him in every tall, dark-haired man she comes across, just as he does with every Kyrati woman roughly her size and age. Searching, searching. Although to be fair, he’s probably not even recognizable, fifteen years’ worth of extra age on his face; it may look like more, he can’t tell. And the hair, and the makeup.

Not long after she’d left he’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror, assessing, and had shaved off his mustache and goatee. Doing so had seemed to make him look older somehow, which didn’t make sense. Aimless, he’d opened drawers and found one of her abandoned eye pencils and thought, what the hell? He’d drawn some on. It was harder than she’d made it look. And then caught up in the spirit of the thing, he’d called Yuma and told her to come up to his suite, that he was in the mood to do fucked up shit to his hair. He’d gotten out the vodka and a couple of glasses. 

Yuma showed up with supplies in hand and then laughed a little when she saw him, had scrubbed at him roughly with a washcloth and sat and made him up properly, and then they’d bleached his hair and got fabulously drunk while they did it. The result was shocking; he certainly didn’t look like himself, that was for sure…which had suited him right down to the ground just then. He’d liked it; it made him look a little trashy, even a little slutty, perhaps. He’d also liked how it made people underestimate him. In any case, about the opposite of dignified kingliness, which also suited him just fine.

No, it’s only wishful thinking, to hope she’d recognize him. Perhaps never did look for him, never looked back, moved on. Maybe she’s moved on, where he couldn’t. Too sorrowful to be much interested in it; sex and lovemaking are for happier times, at least for him. He’s never been able to bury his misery that way; he tried it back in the Triad days, a long time ago. He only wishes that he could kill pain that way. The drugs work so much better for it.

He doesn’t know how long he’ll sit here.

When it’s bright out and the sun is shining off the snowy peaks back home, it’s easier. He can tell himself that she did the right thing, by leaving. For Ajay, to protect him, and that she’s the strongest person he knows, because he couldn’t have made that choice. She left Kyrat with nothing and no one but Ajay in her arms, to start all over on what amounted to a different planet, where people probably sneered over her dress, her accent, her color. Switched worlds entirely, and him sitting here saying he couldn’t have, with so many more advantages of money and heritage and language. And all of that is one hundred percent true; not one word of it a lie.

He may be a brutal killer, an insane king on a stolen throne, but he still reaches for her in the night; still, even now, and sobs like a child. Even then, he never begrudges her the choice she made; it was _right,_ the best choice in a terrible situation.

But still.

There are nights where he feels crazed with pain, too much to bear, and on those nights he wishes, just a little, that he’d shot her and Mohan dead on first sight. Sometimes, on those bad nights, deep down, he’s _furious_ at her for leaving him with a dead baby and a broken mind and a wounded heart and no hope, no hope at all. No hope of there ever being anything good in his life, ever again. He would _never_ have done it to her, left her like that, and damn the consequences. But that’s what makes her the strong one, of the two of them; the fact that she could walk away.

So. Well. He can’t quite force the shake from his hands.

A wreck of a man, a scarred, battered, crazy fuckup of a man. Why _should_ she let him in? No reason to at all. He probably carries a stink with him wherever he goes, of pain and bad memories, and so much of this world, her world now, is unrecognizable to him. He’s thirty-seven years old and feels like a child, a child afraid of the dark, like that damned tiger with the hunters closing in.

Does he want Ishwari to put him down? He doesn’t even know. Perhaps. Perhaps.

\----------------------------------

He has no idea if it’s respect or plain, tail-tucked cowardice that sends him back to Paul’s house without even a sighting of her or Ajay, badly in need of a shower and shave and clean clothes. Paul doesn’t ask him where he’s been, doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t need to, although he lifts a hand and pats his shoulder, a liberty that feels like _pity,_ and sudden hot rage floods through him so strongly that he can feel cold chills run down his skin from that point of contact. 

But with tooth-grinding effort he reigns in that temper somehow and merely ducks away from that hand instead of snapping Paul’s neck in his own home.

Later, when he’s getting cleaned up, he thinks things over. They still have time. Hell, they’re not even forty yet. Still young. He’ll go back to Kyrat, to his solitary existence and honor that agreement, the one she outlined in the letter that’s in his wallet even now. 

_Wait. I’ll be back. Just hold on. I love you._ He shores up that belief with everything in him.

The thought of that makes him feel…if not better exactly, at least less anxious as he sits in Paul Harmon’s house and eats the nice dinner that Paul’s wife cooked specially for him and pretends to be a normal, legitimate, non-murderous businessman. Pats Ashley’s head and praises her shitty piano performance. 

There’s time, there’s still time. They have time.

\-------------------------------------

And as the years pass and another decade and then some goes by, she does keep her end of their agreement. She crosses that great expanse of blue water and comes home to him again, but this time…this time she’s in Ajay’s arms.

 

\--------------------------------------

**Author's Note:**

> As always, suggestions/comments/ideas welcome!


End file.
